When the Devil's in the pulpit and the Hero's on the Cross

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Quadrennial quotes

It’s a long story of how I came to find this one. Okay, not so long as it is boring. And irrelevant. Well, not quite. I was toying with the idea of treating symptoms instead of diseases, and was looking for a Biblical verse. Along the way I found this story, littered as it is with amazing quotes:

“I gave my life to Jesus when I was 21, and while reading the scriptures one day, I saw a passage about Jesus telling people to chop off their hand if it causes them sin or troubles, so that’s what I did. I had a compulsive urge to grab my rod/staff and stroke it which ended up with me spilling my seed, so I knew something was wrong with me …. I tried holding my staff and spilling my seed with my left hand, but it just didn’t feel the same to me, so I decided to chop off my right hand because that was the hand that was giving me the most pleasure and guilt at the same time. I was in a real quandary and was very confused and emotional.”

• • •

“While I was in the emergency room getting sewn up, I met my current wife who was there because she had plucked out her left eye with a salad fork and she was bleeding almost as bad as I was”….

“As we were both lying there on our gurneys, she looked over at me and told me that she was addicted to winking at men she found sexually attractive with her left eye, and that after a while, her left eye seemed to have a ‘mind of its own,’ and that it had gotten her into all kinds of trouble over the past few years.”

“I couldn’t control it, and that’s why I plucked it out, just like Jesus told people to do,” she said.

• • •

“I was afraid our new baby girl might be born without a right hand because my husband had chopped his right hand off, but Dr. Shinto cleared up that evolutionary faux pas in my mind, and I now trust him with my husband’s life and also with his new right hand, whatever it turns out to look like.”

It’s not particularly well-written from a fictional perspective, and the only Google references to Timothy Ringstob I could find lead back to this story. So there’s no follow-up, like how his hand is doing four years later. And I didn’t find any major media coverage, which is odd since they’ll cover a bunch of migrant workers flocking to Yakima, Washington to see an apparition of the Virgin in the oily sheen on the back of a freeway sign.

So I’m really, really hoping this is fiction, because those are some of the funniest quotes I’ve read in a while. Seriously, adapt this thing for the screen, get actors who can deliver those lines straight, and you’ve got … well, okay, not a blockbuster, but an art-house Oscar contender.